Kathy Gyngell

Kathy Gyngell has a first class honours degree in social anthropology from Cambridge and an Oxford M.Phil. in sociology. She has worked for the former ITV companies, LWT and TV-am as a producer and senior programme executive. A full time mother after the birth of her second son, she founded the voluntary organization Full Time Mothers, later renamed Mothers at Home Matter. In 1999 she and David Keighley set up Minotaur Media Tracking, the precursor to Newswatch, an independent broadcast media monitor, which, commissioned by Global Britain, has tracked 12 years of the BBC’s EU coverage. She and David jointly authored three papers for the Centre for Policy Studies on the BBC’s Europhile bias – An Outbreak of Narcolepsy (2004), Blair’s EU Turn (2004), BBC Bias (2005).

Her concern with drug abuse stems from her research for two Centre for Policy Study reports – Shaun Bailey’s No Mans Land: How Britain’s inner city young are being failed (2006) and Ray Lewis’s From Latchkey to Leadership – channeling the talents of inner city youth (2007). She subsequently researched and authored the Addictions reports for Breakdown and Breakthrough Britain, the Conservative Party’s 2007 Social Justice Policy Review. Her recent reports, The Phoney War on Drugs (CPS, 2009) and Breaking the Habit: why the state should stop dealing drugs and start doing rehab (CPS, 2011) haveattracted widespread media coverage and attention. She researches, writes and is media commentator on a range of social policy issues – including family, gender, employment and childcare.